Long Division

Dan Balz of The Washington Post seems like a good fella, and I generally enjoy his campaign work, but, lawsy me, this is 15 minutes I wasted and will never get back.

From the opening quote from a guy who used to work in the administration of C-Plus Augustus, surely a unifying figure in the history of recent American politics, to the end, this is Chuck Toddism run amok. All sorts of dynamics are described, and very few reasons for those dynamics explored. The country is polarized. This is perceived to be a terrible thing. Everybody, of course, is to blame, but what they're blamed for is unclear.

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For example, let's look at one assessment of The Way Things Are that comes late in the piece.

The parties also are more divided racially than before. The Republican Party is almost entirely dependent on white voters. Nine of every 10 votes Romney received were from white voters, according to exit polls. Democrats are increasingly dependent on support from nonwhite voters. Obama got 44 percent of his votes from nonwhite voters.

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No kidding. I wonder how that happened, especially the first part. Did it happen last Thursday? Is it possible that 40 years of thinly -- and not-so-thinly -- disguised race-baiting and backlash mischief might have had an effect on our politics? Who, then, is to blame for the phenomenon described?

Everybody.

Let us continue.

The GOP base, reflected most recently in the rise of the tea party, has become strongly anti-government. At the same time, the Democratic coalition is more pro-government, and many of its constituents are dependent on government programs. It is little wonder that there is scarce common ground between the parties on issues about the size and scope of government.

Tricky stuff, that. The Republicans have a "base" while the Democrats have "a coalition." If Balz were then to conclude, as he should logically, from this that the Republicans are now entirely their basewhile the Democrats have to tailor their politics to suit a longer ideological spectrum, then he might wind up with something useful to conclude about how we got in the mess we're in. But that would undermine the central thesis of this piece which is that who's to blame is...

Everybody.

But, you see, he can't conclude that, because he's already written this nonsense.

Today, there is almost no overlap between the voting behavior of the most conservative Democrats in the House and the most liberal Republicans. That's in part because there are few ­moderate-to-conservative Democrats and ­moderate-to-liberal Republicans left in the chamber.

This is the kind of thing that makes actual liberals fall down laughing in their tofu. Maybe Balz is still pining for the genius that was Heath Shuler, but the rest of us know that there is still Joe Manchin, who ran a commercial where he shot the president's cap-and-trade bill, and who just a couple of weeks ago mused that maybe a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act was a bargain he could make. There's his fellow West Virginian, Nick Rahall, who spent all last week bemoaning how both sides were to blame. There simply is not a Republican member of Congress that you can name who is willing to do anything as heretical as either one of these guys already has done. We keep hearing about these "moderates" who want to open the government and, every time there's a vote, they vanish like a sugar cube in a hot spring. There simply is nobody on the Republican side like John Barrow or Sanford Bishop. Moderate Republicans are extinct. Conservative Democrats are not. There is a reason for this, and it has a lot to do with polarization, but it has more to do with the triumph of unreason. And that is not a bipartisan phenomenon and, as much as the courtier press would like to believe, it is not the fault of...